Posts Tagged ‘public speaking activities’

How To Rig A Speech To Get The Outcome You Want Every Time

Tuesday, February 16th, 2010
Image Credit If You Stack The Deck, Then You'll Win Every Time

If You Stack The Deck, Then You'll Win Every Time

You can’t always do it all by yourself. If you want to make a lasting impression on your audience, then sometimes you just gotta bring in some help to pull it off. Speakers who are ready to move up to the next level in their speaking often come to me and ask for advice. Now that they’ve gotten over their fear of speaking, they want to move on and start to make more of an impact with their audience. It’s time to bring out an advanced speaking skill – rigging a speech.

The Setup

If as a speaker you can put aside your ego long enough to admit that sometimes if you really want to make a lasting impression on your audience, then you are going to have to allow others to help you, then you’ll be half-way there.

An advanced speaking technique is to work with an outsider to act as a “plant” in the audience. Having somebody in the audience who you control gives you enormous power as a speaker when it comes to steering the audience’s mood and reactions.

The most important part of stacking the deck is to make sure that you take the time to rehearse what you want to happen with your partner in crime – these things don’t just happen by themselves.

The Action

When you rig a speech, you need to make sure that you’ve carefully scripted what you want to happen. The three most common uses of a plant are to generate anger, humor, and questions.

Having a member of your audience stand up and angrily shout something out or accuse you of something is a fantastic tool; however, it’s just about as dangerous as nitroglycerin. This is an unexpected action – your audience will not be expecting it and so it will wake them up and grab their attention. I’ve used this one when I knew that what the audience would be thinking at a certain point was directly opposite to what I was telling them. Since you knew that it was coming, you have a fantastic response ready for them, this calms your angry audience member down, and everyone else is very impressed with you. That’s exactly what I did and it took the tension out of the room.

Humor is difficult enough to try to do by yourself let alone with a partner, but if you can pull it off you’ll be able to make a lasting impression on your audience. As with all types of humor, timing is everything here. One of my favorite techniques is to have my plant ask a question and then we end up getting involved in a very fast back-and-forth dialog that amazes and entertains everyone. Once upon a time I answered my plant’s question by saying that something would take 1 year, they replied with 2, I said “3″, they said “4″ and so on.

Finally, one of the worst things that a speaker can do is to wrap up a speech by asking “does anyone have any questions” and then be greeted by dead silence. This is when having a plant can save your life: have them stand up and ask an interesting or controversial question just to get things going. Since you know what they are going to ask, you can structure your speech so that your answer to that question is really part of your speech.

What All Of This Means For You

When you are ready to take your speaking skills up to the next level, starting to “seed” the audience with your trained agents is a great way to ensure that you are able to control how the speech will flow. These agents can control the audience’s mood: get them angry, make them laugh, or ask the questions that they are all thinking about.

As with all tools, the planted agent requires skill to use. You have to take the time both to structure your speech in such a way as to accommodate your plant and to rehearse what each of you is going to say before the big day. Do it right and you’ll have left your audience with a positive lasting impression.

Under what circumstances do you think it would be a bad idea to plant someone in your audience?


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What We’ll Be Talking About Next Time

If you could wish for just one thing before you give your next speech in public, what would it be? Sure we’d all like to be able to talk like Tony Robbins, move a crowd like Zig Ziglar, or even have a powerful story to tell like Rudy Giuliani. However, I’m willing to bet good money that after considerable thought, we’d all settle for spending our wish on making sure that there were no hecklers in the audience.

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Posted in audience | 2 Comments »

Hey Baby, Come Here Often?

Tuesday, November 17th, 2009
Image Credit What's A Nice Girl / Guy Like You Doing In A Place Like This?

What's A Nice Girl / Guy Like You Doing In A Place Like This?

Just like a cheesy pick-up line, the first words that come out of your mouth when you are giving a speech will determine if you are going to get lucky with this audience. Unlike a wanna-be Casanova in a bar, you (normally) don’t have an opportunity to buy your audience a drink, so you’re going to have work extra hard to make your opening lines do all the work for you if you want to have any hope of sweeping the audience off of their feet. How are you going to score?

The 4 Questions That Every Audience Asks Themselves

Hopefully you’ve been given a great introduction. Now it’s your turn to speak. Dana LaMon who was the Toastmasters’ 1982 World Champion of Public-Speaking says that as your audience awaits the start of your speech, they are sitting there asking themselves four questions:

  • Am I going to take the time to listen to this speaker?
  • Am I going to benefit from what he / she talks about?
  • Will they say anything that is valuable that I can take and use?
  • Will anything that they say be worthwhile for me to take action on?

If you waste your first few words, then I can tell you what the answers to these questions will be – and you’re not going to like it!

Am I going to take the time to listen to this speaker?

Aren’t those Blackberry’s and iPhones just the coolest? Today more than ever your audience has other things that they can do while you are talking if they aren’t interested in what you have to say. Let’s pretend for just a moment that today’s jaded audience starts by answering this question with a “No”. Now you’re not just trying to move them to a “yes”, instead you’ve got the doubly hard job of moving them off of “no” and over to “yes”.

Every speech that you give will be different, but you can lose your audience every time if you make one of the following common speaker mistakes:

  • Thanking Anybody: the first words out of your mouth in a speech are the equivalent of waterfront property in real estate – super valuable. Why would you waste them by saying something like “I’d like to thank the Dairy Producers Council for inviting me to talk to you today…”
  • Calling Out Important People In The Audience: I don’t care if Obama himself is sitting in the front row or your audience, wasting your opening words pointing out that you’ve got important people in the audience is just you complementing yourself and nobody really wants to hear you do that.
  • A Man Walks Into A Bar…: Why would anyone waste an opening of a speech on an old, tired joke that has nothing to do with what they are going to be talking about? I’ve seen this happen over and over again. Even when the joke is funny, all too often it doesn’t lead anywhere – it was just a cute thing to say and then the speaker starts his / her speech and the opportunity to grab the audience’s attention has been lost forever
  • The Title Of This Speech Is…: What? Why would I be sitting in the audience if I didn’t already know what you are going to be talking about? Also, don’t waste an opening by introducing yourself “My name is Bob Johnson and I’d like to talk to you about …” Assume that either the audience already knows this information or they just don’t care about it. Get on with the meat of what you are there to talk about

Am I going to benefit from what he / she talks about?

I’m a busy guy and assuming that you have somehow gotten me to answer “yes” to the first question, you sure don’t have any guarantee that I’m going to keep listening to you – I’ve got a lot of email that I could be working my way through on my iPhone.

Right off the bat you are going to have to very concisely tell me why I should care about what you’re going to be talking about for the next 30 minutes or so. Whatever this speech’s purpose is, you’re going to have to keep it short – one sentence is the rule. If it’s longer than that, I’m not going to pay attention. Do this and there is a chance that you’re audience will remember what you said after you are done.

Will they say anything that is valuable that I can take and use?

What’s the greatest complement that a speaker can receive? Is it a standing ovation? Nope. It’s when your audience whips out a pencil and starts to take notes.

In every speech there are some “nuggets” that you want your audience to remember and use after you are done talking. It’s your job as a speaker to make these pieces of actionable information easy for your audience to find and remember. Saying things like “Here are three things that you might want to write down…” are a great way to motivate your audience to take notes.

Will anything that they say be worthwhile for me to take action on?

I’ve taken notes at a lot of speeches that I’ve attended and then I’ve gone home and filed them away somewhere and that was the end of the story. As a speaker this is exactly what you don’t want to have happen.

Instead, you want the information that you are passing on to be used – you really want to change people’s lives. To get your audience to take action you need to do three things: you need to tell them what you want them to do, you need to tell them why they should do it, and then you need to tell them that they can be successful in doing it.

What All Of This Means For You

When I’m coaching speakers who are struggling to break through to the next level in their speaking skills, we spend a lot of time working on the opening of their speech because it is so important. There are an almost unlimited number of ways that you can successfully grab an audience’s attention with your first few words. Unfortunately, there is an almost equal number of ways that you can lose them forever.

You’ll lose them if you spend your time thinking about yourself when you are putting your speech together. If, instead, you spend your time putting yourself in the position of your audience and making sure that you answer the questions that are running though their minds, then you’ll find the words that will grab their imagination from the get-go and you’ll be off and running with the best speech of your life.

What’s the best opening to a speech that you’ve ever seen?

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What We’ll Be Talking About Next Time

Just how much speaking can you do in a single day? We spend a lot of time talking about how to prepare for and give a good speech. However, sometimes life just comes at us like a runaway truck and we find ourselves double or triple (or more) booked to speak in a single day. Oh oh, looks like we’ve got a whole new challenge here…

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Posted in passion | 2 Comments »

Never Give A Speech Without Having A Potato

Tuesday, November 10th, 2009
Every Speaker Must Respect The Power Of A Potato

Every Speaker Must Respect The Power Of A Potato

Bored audiences will get up and walk out of your speeches. How would you keep the attention of 400+ engineers who were attending an industry dinner event that they didn’t really want to be at on a weekday evening? I recently had the opportunity to be the master of ceremonies at such an event – great gig, tough crowd.

The banquet’s master of ceremonies (MC) last year had tried very hard, but had ended up not being able to hold the crowd’s attention and they had started to leave before the event was even half over. This year’s planning committee presented me with a challenge: find a way to keep the audience in their seats until the end of the event. It turns out that a single large baking potato was a key part of my solution to this problem…

Not A Speech, But Rather A 3-Act Play

Two weeks before the banquet was to be held, I had a meeting with the planning committee. The banquet is an annual event for all of the engineers involved in transportation in the Tampa, Florida area. I had been asked to be a co-MC for the event in order to help make it a success. The trouble was that I know next to nothing about the transportation industry.

The other MC knew a lot about the industry having worked in it for over 25 years. This was a perfect pairing – his smarts and my creativity held the key to our potential success.

The planning committee wanted to focus on the future of transportation in Florida. Since this was not a typical speech, there wasn’t a speech to prepare. Instead I was looking at creating a play with three acts: an opening, then a second act after the banquet’s first speaker, but before its second speaker. Finally, there would be a third act that would close out the evening.

The Initial Plan: Potatoes Everywhere

Never one to be at a loss for ideas, my initial plan to the team was to propose other forms of transportation that people may not have thought of: catapults, rocket launchers, etc.

I took my plan one step further and proposed that we get someone to come up from the audience, put an apron on them, and then have them try to carry as many potatoes as possible across the stage. They would end up dropping some and we could say that a better transportation system was called for.

I had other ideas that involved the same potatoes: have planning committee members stand on one side of the stage and try to throw them into a bucket held by another committee member. Lots of potatoes were going to get hurt doing all of this.

In the end, the planning committee flatly rejected my potato idea. The possibility of someone getting hurt was just too great and it was sending a negative message about the transportation solutions that are currently being planned for Tampa. Sadly, I think that they made the right decision.

The Next Plan: Jet Packs

The clock was ticking and we were starting to run out of time. We went back to the drawing board and my co-MC did a web search and found all sorts of images of future transportation systems from the 1940’s and 1950’s covers of Popular Mechanics and Popular Electronics magazines. A new idea started to emerge.

Instead of saying anything negative about Tampa’s current transportation plans, how about if we came up with our own vision of the future of transportation? Make it so outlandish so that everyone knows that it’s not a real plan, but incorporate all of that futuristic stuff that everyone has always believed is coming.

I thought that this was a great idea – with one addition. I wanted to have it all lead up to one thing: a proposal for a jetpack based transportation future. Hey, everyone loves jetpacks and engineers especially love ‘em. The planning committee agreed and one of the members even agreed to build a mock jetpack for us to use.

What This All Means For You

So how did it all turn out you ask? The evening was a smashing success. The audience was riveted to their seats – they had to know how this 3-act play was going to come out. Not a soul left before we told them that the show was over.

My co-MC did a great job of reaching out and drawing the audience in using his deep knowledge of the transportation industry. The three-act play did its job by hooking the audience’s attention in the first act, extending the story in the second act and building up to a big finish in the third act.

The crowning point of the evening was when my co-MC brought out the Jetpack model and put it on and announced that the event was over and he was leaving to go home. That was what the audience had been waiting for!

Oh, and the potato? I had brought one to the event as a backup just in case things didn’t go as planned. We ended up setting it on the podium and not talking about it, not moving it, not doing anything with it. It drove the audience mad with curiosity: why was the potato there? What were they going to do with it? Talk about holding an audience’s attention!

What have you done that has helped to hold your audience’s attention during one of your speeches?

Click here to get automatic updates when The Accidental Communicator Blog is updated.

What We’ll Be Talking About Next Time

Just like a cheesy pick-up line, the first words that come out of your mouth when you are giving a speech will determine if you are going to get lucky with this audience.  How are you going to score?

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Posted in attention | 2 Comments »